Mobile Office

I’m beginning to think that my office setup is a bit of a failure. Sure, I’ve got everything I need packed into a server underneath my desk, but the second I step outside wi-fi range, it becomes a mess of tunnels and DNS tomfoolery.

For the time I’ve been working for myself, I’ve had my development server virtualised on my file server, under my desk. It’s worked pretty well until now, I’m sitting at Central Station, my mobile ‘net is acting up (as it usually does) and I’m finding it impossible to do the work I initially intended.

I’ve got a client who wants me to modify some software for him, and all of my work is at home. My office is right here, and I’m finding it difficult to do anything. It might be worthwhile to transfer my virtual disk to my laptop in order to get work done; A lot of mobile people are resorting to this solution, and I think it’s a reasonably good idea, but not without its drawbacks.

The biggest problem I’d face with taking my virtual server with me is that while Id have constant access to it, the outside world most certainly wouldn’t. Call me prehistoric, but in a cut-throat world where time time equates to opportunity, my development server is also my demonstration server. If I took it off-line, I’d have to replicate the environment and transfer my work somewhere else to spam links to peeps.

I  really need to consider developing a more robust remote access strategy and none of this would be a problem, but there are a lot of variables to consider. What are your free-range office strategies like?

  1. Posted March 1, 2008

4 Comments

  1. Tate

    March 2, 2008 22:13

    I’m quite the opposite; I really *hate* mobile. I prefer to be situated in a single place, one that I’m familiar with. If I’m ever mobile, internet is a *must* and I have remote access to all of my files.

    Have you considered taking a look at distributed versioning control?

  2. Owen

    March 3, 2008 8:33

    It would be relatively simple to have your portable virtual server and your stay-at-home production server sync up every time you’re back on the LAN/WAN at home.

  3. Ash

    March 3, 2008 13:15

    You’re right Owen, but it would still be a manual process, unless I wanted to go all-out and script something very clever.

    I’m not entirely sure how version control would solve my problem, it seems unrelated, and you can’t version databases afaik.

    I guess my niche is that I don’t have a desktop any more. My laptop is what I do all my work on, and it’s a refreshing change to work in a train station, bus stop, or park bench. I don’t often work on park benches though, because the sun’s usually out, and my screen gets hard to read in daylight. >_>

    Thanks for your comments, guys.

  4. Owen

    March 3, 2008 15:00

    You could create a simple bash script that checks the status of your network connection and a check file.

    The script checks to see if you can ping, say, your home router, and then checks to see if it can ping your fileserver (so when the script is running and you’re on mobile internet, these checks will fail). If both conditions are met, the script checks some checkfile that states the last time the sync was completed, if it was a while ago, we do the sync again.

    Stick this script in a cron/similar entry, have it run every 12 hours and away you go.